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Salmon, with Matelote Sauce
Make a marinade, in which stew the salmon. When the fish is done, pick off the scales carefully. To keep the salmon hot pour the marinade over it. Then make a matelote sauce in the following manner. Put a good bit of butter and two spoonfuls of flour into a stewpan, and make a roux. When it begins to colour, throw four or six onions into the roux, and let them melt; keep stirring with a wooden spoon. Then moisten with a bottle of red wine; add a few spoonfuls of the marinade in which you have stewed the salmon, some trimmings of mushrooms, a bunch of parsley and green onions well seasoned, and a small piece of glaze; season the whole, and put a little sugar to correct the acidity of the wine; skim the grease, and keep the sauce thick. In case it should not be thick enough to mask with, add a small piece of butter kneaded with flour, a quarter of a pound of fresh butter, some essence of anchovies, the juice of a lemon, and some salt and pepper. Drain the fish, and cover it with the sauce, after having strained this through a tamis.
A classic Franco-Victorian treatment: whole salmon poached in a wine marinade, then masked with a red-wine sauce built on a coloured roux. The original assumes you already know what a marinade, a glaze and a tamis are.
- The hinge: don't actually stew it"stew the salmon" in this idiom means barely trembling liquid, not a boil. Hard simmering squeezes out albumin and leaves the flesh chalky. Modern practice takes salmon off at around 125-130F at the thickest point; a side or centre cut of 3-4 lb will need roughly 15-20 minutes at a bare shiver, though the original gives neither size nor time.
- What the marinade isThe page does not say. A wine-based court-bouillon (red wine, water, sliced onion and carrot, parsley stalks, thyme, bay, peppercorns, salt) is the usual thing of this kind, and the sauce later borrows spoonfuls of it. No quantities are given anywhere on the page, so treat it as a formula rather than a measurement and use enough to just cover the fish.
- Glaze"A small piece of glaze" is glace de viande, veal or beef stock reduced to a sticky, jelled paste. A teaspoon of commercial demi-glace or a very reduced stock does the same job. It is there for body and savour, not for meat flavour as such.
- Essence of anchoviesA Victorian bottled anchovy extract, sold alongside mushroom ketchup. Anchovy paste or a little colatura, added at the very end off the heat, gives the same salt-and-umami lift. Start with half a teaspoon; it is easy to overdo against salmon.
- A bottle of red wineRead this as a full 750 ml, which is why the sugar is there to correct the acidity. Use something dry and unoaked, and let the sauce reduce well before the finishing butter goes in, or it will taste thin and sharp.
- Onions"four or six onions" probably means small ones, and "let them melt" points to softening rather than browning, though they go into a roux already beginning to colour. Since the sauce is strained through a tamis at the end, they are aromatics, not texture.
- Beurre manié and the finishThe "butter kneaded with flour" is beurre manié, whisked in a pinch at a time to thicken. The quarter pound of fresh butter is a separate step: whisk it in cold, off the heat, and do not let the sauce boil afterwards or it will split.
- TamisA drum sieve of fine cloth. A chinois or a fine conical strainer, pressed with a ladle, gives the same result. Note that the original strains at the very end, after the finishing butter; straining before it, so the emulsion is not broken by pushing it through, is a departure from the text.
- YieldNo number of servings is given, but a whole bottle of wine and a quarter pound of butter make a very generous quantity of sauce. Halving the wine and butter is reasonable for a family-sized piece of salmon.
Matelote comes from matelot, sailor, and originally meant a fisherman's stew of freshwater fish cooked in wine with onions — eel, carp and pike on the Loire and the Marne rather than salmon. By the nineteenth century French professional cookery had also attached the name to a sauce, which continued to exist alongside the stew: red wine, roux, onions, mushroom trimmings, glaze, finished with butter and anchovy. Cassell's, compiled for English households with pretensions to a French table, reproduces that professional formula almost untranslated, which is why it names a tamis and a piece of glaze without explaining either. Salmon in red wine looks odd to a modern eye trained on white wine with fish, but it was thoroughly conventional in the period, and the pinch of sugar "to correct the acidity" suggests that Victorian table wine may often have been sharper than what reaches a supermarket shelf today.